Winter Breathes

Mark McDonnell

Winter Breathes

and though it doesn't snow
we feel that catching breath,
peer closer now and keener
into granular light.
Ready for the snow,
we'll float through air-thin days 
like a midnight leaf.

Coats. Hats. A relief
to be a darkened thing
in smudged and smoking dark.
Inside blurs with out:
a house strewn with twigs
and sodden grass from boots.
Glove prints melt on walls

while, echoing like halls,
the fields are palatial white.
We used to think the smallest
birds would freeze and fall,
indent their glittered graves;
we'd watch the shifting powder
closely, for beak or wing. 

Rum-stoked soon, we'll sing.
Heartclutched, muffled throats
will swell for childhood.
We wait for our roaring past
to broach the liquored dam,
for dumbly festive glow
to soothe with cheapest tears.

Give us that first day
when the world is white.
Forgive us our fickle ways
when February's wagons 
spill their gritty load.

And still it hasn't snowed.




Mark McDonnell lives in Staffordshire, England, with his wife, teenage twins, and two cats. He teaches English in a secondary school. His poems have appeared in various journals including The Dark Horse, Stand Magazine, Think, Antiphon, and Measure, and he has been shortlisted for the Times Literary Supplement's Mick Imlah Poetry Prize.